INTERVIEW WITH PAUL McCARTY

January 4, 2002

EM:  Good morning!  This is Earl Mulderink with Paul McCarty on Friday, January 4, 2002.  Good morning, Paul.  I’d like to know if there’s anything you would like to start with today.

PM:  Good morning, Earl.  I have something here.  I think I told you about copying down a number of years ago, an article that I thought was interesting on the true Church of Christ.  Do you remember?  I found it and copied it and some of this I have as I copied it before in longhand, tried to figure out my shorthand, and copied it in longhand.  I guess I must have added a few things to it, so I understood maybe what they were talking about.  And I don’t quite know which ones they are.  Anyway, most of this is not my idea, but I go along with a lot of it.  Not everything.  But it’s something to think about, I think.  And there’s some things that I’ve got marked here that I thought were especially interesting and I go along with that.  I think I really go along with that.  One of them here is instead of confining the infant of God in the low being of parts and passions conceived by some good ignorant church official of bygone eras, the open mind flows forth in its own native freedom, and its God is the whole creation, larger in every way than his limited concept.  Let’s see.  Another one here is, let’s see, under the new definition, he has looked upon his religion as having to do with the salvation of his soul.  A sort of school in which he is coached in catechism, and I’ve marked that out so I knew what it was, and creed that he may be prepared to go to a place called heaven after he dies.  And I agree with that wholly.  I mean that’s my idea.  And another one here, at the last, it says the construction of this church is orderly, definite and exact.  It is not done in a moment, but little by little, the man is built from within to without.  A new creature of consciousness, mind and body.  In other words, it points out all the way through here that the new Church of Christ is in your mind.  It’s not in some organization that can make it any way they want it.  And that’s why we have so many different churches, different churches, and so many gods, because each one makes it the way they want it.  And this points that out.

EM:  Right

PM:  But the true God is in your mind.  And it says here if you’ve done good, you will be rewarded.  Now this is the last.  If you have done good, you will be rewarded.  But you must not claim your good as your merit card that gives you any preference to regeneration.  You must be willing to become as nothing in the sight of man.  It is only then that your personal mentality loses its center and the atoms of your being change their polarization from the material to the spiritual plain and you come forth from the tomb of confusion to the light of understanding.  Anyway, I’ve got several things marked out here that I thought was interesting.

EM:  Okay.  I’ll take this with me.  Do you need this back?

PM:  Yeah.  That’s the only copy that I have.  I’ve got the other so messed up now that I threw it away.

EM:  I will photocopy this.

PM:  Could you photocopy two in other words, make two copies?  I want to send one to Dennis.

EM:  I’m sure Dennis would be really interested.

PM:  Yeah, I think he would.

EM:  It’s interesting to think about your view on religion.  And as you went over this material, it made me think of people like Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson from the early nineteenth century.

PM:  I read quite a bit about him.

EM:  I was going to ask you that, because your views seem to be very much like those New England philosophers.

PM:  Emerson especially.

EM:  Yeah.  One of my favorite essays by Emerson is Self Reliance.  And, there’s some very powerful messages in their about retaining your individual dignity and strength and I’d say if there’s ever any sermon that I’ve adhered to, it would be that essay by Emerson.  And I think you have, too, in many ways.

PM:  Yeah.  Another of them is Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking.  And then I read another book after that and I had it for a while.  I can’t find it.  It’s The Power of Positive Believing.  And it points out that thinking, positive thinking, it mentions Norman Vincent Peale, and The Power of Positive Thinking is the start for believing and if you keep thinking something you start believing it.  And if you believe it, it becomes true, whatever it is.  But in your mind, it is true.  And if it’s good and positive in other words, then it’s good.  It will help you.  But if it isn’t, something like trying to kill somebody or rob somebody or something like that then it does you harm.  See?  That’s you’re believing.  You do as you believe.  And each person believes maybe a little bit different and this is good because in your search for truth, you think things first and that’s your intellect.  And then as your intellect keeps working it over, then your subconscious starts working on that and it goes into your subconscious and then it’s part of you.  And you act according to that and your whole body acts.  And a lot of that points that out.

EM:  There’s no doubt that positive thinking is correlated with positive physical health.  And so it becomes a cycle.  If you think positively, you’ll feel better.  And if you feel better, you’ll think positively.  I think you’re an example of that.

PM:  Right.

EM:  That’s hard to do.  That we face ordinary life, it’s hard to maintain that positive outlook.  I came here with just one question for you today.  We can talk about many things.  We’ve discussed lots of the past; you past ranging from the nineteen teens to the nineteen nineties.  As we start a new year, 2002, I’m wondering if you have any predictions or thoughts about the future.  You’ve lived a long life.  You’ve seen many interesting things happen.  You’ve seen revolutionary things happen.  So I’m curious what you might predict for the future.

PM:  Well, I’m not much to predict the future.  I hope that the future can be good.  According to the past, we have made progress, I think, in a lot of ways.  And we got rid, to a certain extent, we put down, even in a lot of the religions, we put down racism and a lot of religions were very racist, you know.  So, they’ve accepted and now some of the religions that I’m thinking about that were really racist, has there people right out pulling for the, right out trying to build up other races, probably more than they should.  I listen on the news this morning, they were interviewing Pat Buchanan, and he wrote a book evidently, and this book is probably quite racist.  His book says that the white race, oh, he don’t say “the white race” exactly, but the Europeans and Americans are dying off.  And Asians and so forth are taking over and so forth.  And I just listened to him.  To my notion, he’s, he doesn’t, like a lot of articles you read in the paper, they don’t make any sense at all.  And there’s no future to them. 

EM:  I would say that Pat Buchanan is a fear monger and that has been his career whether working as a speech writer for Richard Nixon or campaigning for the Presidency.  Much of his appeal has been based on racist and populist appeal to the white working class or maybe even the white middle class.  But it’s his fear of foreigners, his fear of non-Christian, non-white people that seems to propel him these days.  I think you’re right that he is racist.  But he’s a little more careful than ___________ from the past.  But, so part of your future prediction is that we will continue to see racism and religious differences?

PM:  I think so, but maybe we can make, it seems to be clearing up some.  I would like to be able to have my health and live for another twenty years or fifty years to see what, I’ve seen a lot in the past, and I’ve seen things that shouldn’t have been.  Like, for instance, well, Smith, you know, I mentioned Smith, the Jewish grocery store owner there, that I worked with in California.  He pointed out even at that time, that was before the War, before we got in the second World War, it was going on in Europe then, but he pointed out that Europe, that, like the Hearst papers and so forth and some of the articles by William Randolph Hearst, some of his articles, what do you call them?

EM:  Editorials?

PM:  Editorial, yes.  That he wrote in the Los Angeles Examiner and the San Francisco Examiner and so forth, were damming the Communists and blaming them for all the trouble that was going on and it looked like they wanted Hitler to win, they were backing Hitler, you see.  To certain extent, they were backing Hitler because the Communists were supposed to be Communists and Hitler was supposed to be a capitalist and that’s the way it looked.  And he pointed out, he said, sure there’s bad Communists, but there’s also good Communists.  And he said you can’t condemn the whole Soviet Union because there’s a few bad Communists or a bunch of bad Communists, maybe, that are trying to take over and run the thing, run the government.  And he said that the Soviet Union, he claimed Stalin, like Stalin, because he thought Stalin was building up the Soviet Union.  And he probably was at that time, before the War, 90% of the people were illiterate and they were against religion because the Russian Orthodox Church was running things before the Communists took over and they were just like or worse than at that the time, they really took over and were running things and they wouldn’t educate the people. They were just like we were.  Our people refused to educate the slaves because they wanted the work.  And so there was forced religion in other words.  And this speaks about forced religion to a certain extent, forced religion.  So this is why the Communists were so dead set against religion and why they did some of the things that they did.  And I don’t know if Stalin was in back of it.  He probably was, a lot of it, to kill them off, when he did take over, to kill off the ruling bunch, the Russian Orthodox, the people in other words, the religions.

EM:  Of course Smith was expressing those years around 1940 and yet within the next fifty years, the USSR would disintegrate and it would no longer be the most formidable Communist or Socialist nation in the world.  Today, of course, China, People’s Republic of China, still is considered a Communist state, although they’ve showed hints of increased capitalistic activity.  Do you have a prediction of the future of Communism in the world?

PM:  I don’t know.  Communism depends on what kind of Communism.  Whether it’s the kind of Communism that kills people off, the enemy, in other words, they consider their enemy, or the ones that try to build.  Smith said there’s two different Communists, just like our people here.  We had two different kinds. There’s the Roosevelt Democrats and then there’s the Southern Democrats.  And the Southern Democrats were pulling for Hitler and the Roosevelt Democrats were pulling for to try to build.  And they were backing, especially after Hitler attacked Russia, and so I brought up a lot of things because I was brain washed from reading things.  From reading all the things like the petitioning of Poland and all of that and then I couldn’t understand why when Germany marched into Poland, Hitler marched into Poland, then Russia came in on the other side, they partitioned Poland and then they met in the middle there and then why they didn’t unite, you know, and be allies, right then, with the rest of the world.  And Hitler said because they were against one another.  The reason Hitler marched into Poland is because he wanted the Ukraine.  He wanted to go into the Ukraine, the breadbasket, and capture the Ukraine and Stalin wasn’t about to let him do that.  And…

EM:  You raise an important point about that period that seems really relevant today.  Nationalism is still more potent than either capitalism or Communism.  It’s the nation state that often dictates policies and patriotism.  And I’d be curious to learn what you think about American nationalism.  Right now, we have had a surge of so-called patriotism and I’m wondering if you think that will continue.

PM:  I hope not.  [laughter]  Because we can’t live in a world that like I mentioned his name just a minute ago, that Pat Buchanan mentioned, in a divided world.  With all of our, in other words, we have to try to build a world instead of destroying it.  In the meantime, we’re destroying it.  And we have destroyed it.

EM:  Well, you’ve discussed before, over-population being a major problem, and that’s not to mention the ongoing arms race.  Even though the Cold War is officially over, I suppose, we still have militarization and weapon sales fueling the economy and so it seems that one way or another, we might do ourselves in as a species, in centuries to come.

PM:  Yes.  This is what I, this is my prediction, what I would predict, unless we can get rid of, can educate people.  We should start out by educating our children instead of building up patriotism and building up religion in them and so forth.  Come back to the founding fathers.  All men are created equal.  All men all over the earth are created equal.  I started to write up something on that, on ideas on that and I haven’t finished it yet.  There’s a lot in that.  We could build that up for the whole world and for instance we lost a chance when of trying to work with Russia, with the Soviet Union in other words, when the war ended there, to build civilization, and to build peace all over the world.  We lost that.  And I was against that because right away we was going to put Communism down and what we called Communism in other words, and the was the Soviet Union, the Russian people.  And we were going to, we didn’t care what happened to them in other words.

EM:  American nationalism is more important at this time than a type of global unity or peace.  And it’s economic, political and ideological but American politicians put what America needs first.  And that’s how they maintain control.

PM:  This is what Smith said.  What Smith claimed.  He was supposed to be a Communist they claimed.

EM:  He had a broader view of the world.  And I don’t believe that most Americans believe that all men are created equal.  The history of our country has shown that white people have to tried to dominate non-white people.  And in today’s world, in my opinion, Americans wish to dominate and oppress non-Americans.

PM:  That’s right.

EM:  So, I don’t think that people in this country have shown much faith in the words of our founding fathers.

PM:  Right.  I find article after article in the paper that points out that all men are not created equal.  They say that they back the founding fathers, but all men are not created equal.  One of them is right here.  One article strong article is right here that I mentioned the other day in the Legion Magazine.  Back to the basics of the Constitution.  He wants to go back to the basics of the Constitution.  But yet, they don’t want to, according to the way this writer, and that’s according to the way most of the Legion seems to work, they don’t want us to make any progress in peace.  And we’ve got to change.  We can’t stay the way that we were in biblical times, or in war times, and so forth, because the earth is going ahead and people are going ahead and we’re learning more and so forth, and so forth.  And we got to keep up with it.  We got to keep up with the times.  And so this is our problem.  If we don’t try to keep up with the times and so forth, we’d never make any progress.  And so it depends, the main thing we could do, still, would be to try to educate our children and so forth and stop this “America First” and patriotism and so forth, “America #1” as it says on this hat and because we’re living in a peaceful world.  America can’t be number one.  We’re the only super power now.  We killed the other one, or they killed themselves.  It was partly their fault, sure.  But for instance, I keep, I think of Reagan when “Gorbachev!  Tear down that wall!  Tear down that wall!”  I think Gorbachev wanted to tear down that wall, but after all, he had a lot of people in back of him.  And he was trying, I think he was trying to do something to promote peace in the world.  And Gorbachev could have unloosed an atomic bomb.  And we could have atomic exchange and we were preparing for it.  And Reagan was building that up.  He seemed to want an atomic exchange there.  And I heard people over the radio there, mostly Reagan republicans, saying that, talking about our chances of being able to withstand an atomic attack.  Try to stand an atomic attack.  Well, why should we try to bring on an atomic attack?  Russia had atom bombs. They could have destroyed Europe.  The Soviet Union could have destroyed Europe.  They could have destroyed Europe.  There’s no question about that.  Maybe they could have reached America.  I don’t know.  But even if they didn’t, with the atomic radiation all over Europe, we couldn’t live hardly in a world of that kind.  Destroyed half the world.

EM:  Well, luckily, no atomic bombs have been dropped on people since 1945.  But that threat has always been present.  In some ways, it’s become a little more uncertain because of the countries that do supposedly have atomic bomb capability, including India and Pakistan, the People’s Republic of China, and perhaps, some of these so-called renegade nations.  Do you ever see atomic weapons being used on the global scene?

PM:  Did I ever see it?

EM:  No, again, go back to the future.  Do you think that will ever happen, that we might see the use of atomic weapons?

PM:  I hope not because it leaves radiation and it’s so strong.  And here’s another thing.  Dr. Oppenheimer, the builder of the atomic bomb, he made a talk.  I’ve heard part of his speech anyway, or read it or something.  Where he said that after that, the he wouldn’t work on the hydrogen bomb.  The hydrogen bomb itself is not, hydrogen itself is not necessarily radio active.  It don’t hold radio-activity.  But to set it off, they would have to use uranium which is radio-active or plutonium which is really radio-active.  It’s very poisonous.  Which is number nine, let’s see, uranium is 92.  Plutonium is 94, I think it is, isn’t it?  Well anyway, there’s one between there, as I’m told, that goes into plutonium.  The thing is, if we use, he said he wouldn’t have anything to do, or words to that effect, with the hydrogen bomb.  To develop hydrogen power, that’s one thing.  But to develop plutonium, that’s another thing that we could destroy the earth with plutonium.

EM:  Well, as you can tell, I’m asking questions about the future because you’ve had a lot of life experience and I’m just curious how those life experiences may shape your thoughts about the future.  What about political changes?  Do you see our country’s political system staying a two-party system?  You’ve expressed great desires to see this happen.  Or do you think something else will happen?

PM:  I hope that the two-party system will stay.  Democratic, Republican system can stay because that is, we can’t have a Democratic or any better government the way I can see it, is our Democratic Republican government.  This is basic to the whole world.  It’s an example that we can set before the whole world.  A one-party system or a no-party system like they every other nation has or like France had, and some of them have a multi-party system, and that’s no good either, because nobody knows who to vote for.  And an example of this in this last election with so many parties, the, we don’t, and this was a close race between the Democrats and the Republicans, and we don’t, then these others throws a monkey wrench into the, or throws a joker into the deck.

EM:  But, you could argue the opposite, Paul, that with two-party dominance, then dissent and individualism are not really encouraged.  That is, the two major parties in this country have a lot of similar views and especially when you look at something like the Cold War, Democrats and Republicans jumped over each other trying to prove how loyal they were, how patriotic they were, and how much they wanted to defeat Communism.  And so, the two-party system sometimes does not allow for sufficient dissent or disagreement.  What would you say to that?

PM:  Well, this is right.  But on the other hand, with a one-party or a no party system, you’ve heard people say, “I vote for the man.  I don’t vote for the party.”  Well how you going to vote for the man?  You don’t know what he’s going to do.  Or you don’t know him, or something.  Or maybe have a dozen different people, maybe no primary, and a dozen different people running for the same office.  You can’t keep up with them.  You don’t know what they’re going to do.  You at least know something about your party.  This is where instead of pushing belief in religion and so forth, push belief in our two-party system and our vote and so forth, and vote for the good of the public or the good of the world in other words.  Speak about our freedom.  Well, we need our freedom.  We all want our freedom.  But if we destroy the earth, then nobody’s got any freedom.  So taking care of the environment and taking care of the earth, that should be number one.  And then freedom of voting for our people is, should be next, seems to me like.  And to build a better world.  But to build a better world with the idea that all men are created equal, I’ve got here, you copied this, all persons are created equal by our creator, the god of nature, which created everything that exists and called it good.  That’s according to our founding fathers.  And this is what we should believe in and try to follow and that means all men and not America first men.  Or America first men.  That means all people, all people, regardless of who they are.  Now, if there’s something the matter with them, if they’re criminals or something like that, then they have to be taken care of.  Or else taught to, that other people are important, too.  My dad, my father, I think he was right in one respect.  He never really pushed his religion on anybody.  He was Catholic and my mother wasn’t.  And my mother’s mother, she was more or less, she didn’t know anything about the Catholics, but she had a idea, you know, that there was something wrong with them or something.  And anyway he always said to keep out of an argument, he always said that, stressed the golden rule.  He said if people would remember the golden rule and follow that, he said they wouldn’t go too far wrong.  And mother believed that, too.  My mother believed that, too.  I think grandmother did, too, but she was quite religious.

EM:  It’s a simple concept, but if everyone adhered to the golden rule most of our world would have fewer problems.

PM:  Um-hmm.  Yeah.  Do unto others as you would be done by.

EM:  Yeah.

PM:  But, on, getting back on destroying the earth with, that’s just, probably an atomic exchange would be probably the worst.  But of course diseases and stuff like that, that’s bad too, you know.  I had small pox and my whole family had it, except grandma.  She’d worked with Dr. Staggs and she had been vaccinated and so she didn’t get it.  My cousin, his wife died from the effects of it and yet they had five children and the second boy, and next one was a girl and they both died later on from the effects of it.  They died from TB actually.  But it was brought on by run downness of small pox.  Lula, his wife, she was a healthy strong woman, worked hard and so forth.  She just never got over the small pox, then she come down with TB.

EM:  I marvel at your health in that up until very recently, you had not been to a doctor in something like ten years, and you’re very healthy.  Do you think that it’s luck?  Do you think it’s your habits?  Do you think it’s inherited?  How do you explain your pretty good health over the years?

PM:  It’s probably, a lot of it is luck, there’s no question about that.  And, but I try to, I try to do the things that, or to think rather, the things to keep my health up.  The main thing is not to worry, not to, I think is not to worry about anything.  There’s, anything that’s negative will tear down your health in other words, you can, well like this.  If I worried about for fifty years I couldn’t be cleared to do my work, my work on a job that I was trained for, I could have drove myself into the grave, and I darn near did.  And that’s one thing I learned.  In that respect, that was good for me.

EM:  Well, when do you think you learned that?  And what made you learn that?

PM:  Well, over a period, well, the main thing I think was probably my wife, Polly, had a lot to do with that, with, cause I could see what happened to her in a way and she probably worried quite a bit to begin with and that’s why she lost her baby, I guess.  And, but I didn’t know why exactly at that time, but she just never, I guess she just never got over it.  She was well, and happy, and strong before that and, did lots of exercise and so forth and always bust and after that she wasn’t the same hardly.  She, but yet she tried.  She tried to not to think about things.  It was a disaster.  And I remember at one time, we were, one of the main things that bothered her, she claimed she was a capitalist.

EM:  Right.

PM:  And she saved her money and invested it and I spent it trying to build a business and she went along with me because she thought I was going to build a business, I guess, and I thought I was, too.  But anyway, she just couldn’t, she couldn’t take not having any money and so forth.  And then when her aunt died, and left her an inheritance there, then she was able to pay off some of our bills and made me promise not to go in debt any more.  And then she was all together different.  She seemed to feel a lot better and she joined the Civil Air Patrol.

EM:  I think those financial stresses can really go far beyond the financial hardship to create emotional and psychological difficulties.

PM:  Um-hmm.

EM:  Of course, everybody goes through that at some point in their lives.  But the key is how do you deal with it and how do you get beyond it so you can be healthy.  Not just financially healthy, but emotionally healthy.

PM:  Emotionally, yeah.  That’s the main thing.  I guess the main thing is just, it’s hard not to let it bother you, but when somebody comes around and want’s their money all the time, but of course I was, see, I was getting away from all that.  Cause I was traveling.  I think that’s why she insisted that I take a job, if I couldn’t get a job here, around here somewhere, go somewhere where I could get a job.  And to follow these employment guides and so forth and to go where I could get a job.  Like when we was in Salt Lake, from Grand Junction, we moved to Salt Lake because work was better in Salt Lake at the time, and so forth, and then work dropped off, and then it was better back East, and I went back.  She insisted I go back East, well I don’t know that she insisted it, but it was all right with her if I did.  And in other words, let’s pay the bills.  And that is the main thing in life, to pay the bills.  My folks used to say, too, of course they never had any money, but dad always said, well mother, too, never buy, well, mother was more than dad was, never buy anything that you can get along without.  Mother wouldn’t buy anything she could get along without.

EM:  That’s good advice.

PM:  But we didn’t have any money at that time, and they had a hard time.  They had to pay the taxes on the property.  They didn’t own it.  My dad’s brother owned it, but we lived on it.  So we paid the taxes and then we raised food for him and grandmother, his mother that lived with him, dad’s mother.

EM:  Well, again, I’m trying to draw predictions out of you today.  Do you think we’ll ever have anything like the Great Depression again?

PM:  Well we could have.  It depends, I think, on how we run things.  We’ve got a good start.

EM:  Well, we’ve had a recession…

PM:  Yeah.

EM:  …for perhaps the last twelve to eighteen months and a lot of people are out of work.  And a lot of companies have cut their payrolls.  The stock market’s been down.  We’ve certainly had an economic downturn.  But, I hope we never see another Great Depression.  I was curious if you thought we might.

PM:  I hope not.  I hope that if we do, people will try to live though it and get along the best they can and not, one of the things that I think causes trouble, causes people’s bad health and so forth is going out and buying a lot of stuff that they can’t pay for and then they have no money to pay for it and they have to take up, and that’s one thing we never did, was to take up, what do they call it, take the, people that can’t pay their bills and so forth.

EM:  Debtor’s laws or bankruptcy?

PM:  Bankruptcy.  Yeah.  Take bankrupt laws.  My folks never did.  Course they never had anything to bankrupt.

EM:  Well, there has been an increase of bankruptcies in the last few years.  Mainly people who live a lavish lifestyle.  You know, with fancy cars and bigger homes and basically live beyond their means.

PM:  Um-hmm.

EM:  But this year, there’s been a change in bankruptcy laws to make it harder for people to avoid paying back their debt.  But it’s frustrating people, perhaps like us, who pay our bills, just to see people skate by and declare bankruptcy, then live the life that they lead.

PM:  It’s too easy a lot of time, seems to me like, to borrow money, accept when you need it.  When you need it, then you can’t get it.  We needed it and we couldn’t borrow it.

EM:  Well, now we have so many credit cards.  In the mail every day, we get at least one credit card application.  And all we’d have to do is send it in and they’d give us a credit card.  Then we could charge thousands of dollars.  It’s too easy.

PM:  Yeah.  Polly, I think, she kept one credit card, I think.  She cut the rest of them up and threw them in the stove.  And I do, too.

EM:  I’m going to flip over this tape to side B.  Okay?

PM:  Okay.  Yeah.

[END OF SIDE A]

PM:  I think it’s hard to predict anything because you, well, I don’t like to predict anyway.  A person, are better off, I think, for their own health and so forth to live in the present as near as I can tell.  And use the past for a kind of a guide and then to go in the future as a kind of a, as, by guiding yourself, in other words, keep, get everything in hand in the present and then the future, more or less, takes care of itself I think.  So it’s really hard to predict what’s going to happen because you don’t know.  Things can change and we hope for the better.  And they should change.  But they won’t change if people is like these articles here.  And this is one trouble with the Legion.  And I followed the Legion books for a long time.  Or who the writers are.  They keep taking us back to their interpretation of something which may or may not be true.  It may not be like it should be.  I think there again that those articles points it out.

EM:  You raise an excellent point that most therapists or psychologists would agree with, that the healthiest person is the one that lives in the present.  They don’t lament the past.  They don’t try to predict the future.  They simply live in the present.  It’s hard to do.  We spent much of our time, in our conversations, talking about your past.  And it’s hard, though, to live in the present, isn’t it, all the time.  Maybe it becomes easier as one gets older.  I find it hard to live in the present.  Looking forward or looking back is easier.

PM:  Well, you can’t change the past.  So far, we don’t know how.  So the best thing to do is to use it as, to try to learn.  To live in the present and try to learn from the past, what the mistakes that you’ve made, you can’t change them, and but I found out in life that some of the worst mistakes you made somewhere it tapers off as you get older, and if you try keep things right in the present, I’m not very happy about a lot of the things that I did in the past and most of them I didn’t do purposely, but the way I, well the way I treated my family, for instance, I’m sorry about that, but I can’t do anything about it now.  And it looks as though the kids don’t resent it.  They back me.  And I talked to Dave, my oldest boy, over the. I talked to him several times lately and he’s build up that room on the house, I think it was his garage or something and he’s changed it over into a room, and he wants me to come live with him.  That’s in Georgia.  He says something about his that I never go to a rest home.  He was sorry that Mom had to go to the rest home, but there was nothing he could do at the time about it.  Well, it’s not, if I have to go to the rest home, I’d have to.  My mother was in a rest home and so forth and…

EM:  He’s built a room or he has space for you.

PM:  Yeah.  And he indicated, I think, that his new wife would take care of me, but I wouldn’t feel right about that either.

EM:  You’re used to being here, in your own house, quite independent.  It would be a challenge to everyone including you, I think.

PM:  Yes, it would.  I won’t, I told him right out that I wouldn’t leave here as long as I could take care of myself.  As long as I keep going and take care of myself.  And I’d rather stay and take care of myself as long as I can.

EM:  Right.  Although this recent health issue, obviously, makes you think about things and your son think about things.  So I’m glad to hear that he’s talking about it.  You just don’t know.  Today, you look great!  I’m glad that you’ve taken care of your recent medical tests, and on Monday you’ll find out more, I guess, when you meet with the doctor.

PM:  Well, all those tests that they, I don’t know if I’ll find out anything.  They told me it would be two weeks, and that’s only one week from the time I made the tests, ‘cause that was last Friday, see?  And they, he put a lot of, he said he was going to have to give me some electric shocks and he said it’s not going to be all that bad.  He said it don’t feel good, but it’s not going to be all that bad.  So you have to use needles then put electricity on the needles and that goes on the computer.  I said, yeah, go ahead.  I’m an electrician.  I know what a shock is.

EM:  Was this Dr. Smith?

PM:  No, it was in the hospital, in the lab.  I can’t remember his name, but I was too, they took x-rays and all kinds of stuff there.  Blood tests and everything you could think of I guess.  That took me about an hour, those electric shocks and so forth.  They run needles all down my legs here, mostly from here down, I think, they wanted to find out if back operation was causing trouble.  He said that they, after I said, “What have you found out?”  I asked him when they got done and he said, “Well,” he said, “So far, there’s nothing wrong with you.”  He said, “We’ll have to see how.”  So far, we don’t know in other words.  And he said it would be about two weeks.  They have to send this all in evidently some place and have it checked over.

EM:  And later today, you’re going food shopping with Cindy?

PM:  With Cindy.

EM:  That’s good.  That’s something you do every week?

PM:  Just about every week, yeah.  I didn’t go last week, and we usually go on Friday or Saturday, now but we go on Friday after she gets off work because she works Friday and gets off at 3:30 and she’s over here about four o’clock, to pick me up.  And Ben is going to, he’s been taking me to the doctor.  He’s going to take me to the doctor Monday and so forth.  Whether I find out anything, I don’t know what to say.  This is Dr. Smith.

EM:  Well, I’ve said before that I think he’s an excellent doctor.

PM:  Well, he, they got all these tests to go by but I guess he makes the original decisions or something from the tests.

EM:  Well, I’m glad to hear that.  You’re looking healthy and today I wanted to talk about the future, which is hard to do I know.  Is there anything that you wanted to bring up today before we wrap it up?

PM:  No, I don’t think so.  The only thing that might, let’s see, uh, this, over here, this, sometime we could go into this and go through what, I mentioned the when they were questioning me there at Paducah, I mentioned the golden rule and I can’t find it any place in the questions here.  But there’s a place here on page sixty-nine that mentions the golden rule and I think you copied these and so forth.  From that you could, and I just wrote down the golden rule after that.  And I know that I told them at that time, and see that was in ’53, and I told them at that time that, and even in the back here, I was reading this, but I haven’t had a chance to go through this yet, and try to find it.  But I know I mentioned the golden rule.  But I don’t, I haven’t seen it.

EM:  But the golden rule, it works if other people abide by it.  Even if you abide by it and someone else doesn’t, that doesn’t allow the golden rule to exist.

PM:  Well, yes, it does, see?  Because you, I abide by the golden rule.  I believe in the golden rule because I was raised in the golden rule.  And I was raised to believe that you do to others as you have been done by.  In other words, to hell with others, but you do as you want others to do you.  As you think they ought to do to you.  Not as they do to you.  In other words, if they try to kill you, you don’t go out and kill them.  You have a right to protect yourself, sure.  And we, the United States, has the right to protect itself.  But we have no right to dominate other people, see?  So, we’re not living according to the golden rule.  If the United States lived according to the golden rule, we would do as we want others to do to us.  See?  It’s a, I didn’t understand that, too, but I think I did at Paducah when they were questioning me, because, I don’t know, maybe I didn’t.  But I understood later on what it meant.  It’s, those articles there, it’s something in your mind, see?   That you do as you think you want others to do to you, not as they do, but as you want them to do, see?  That makes you feel better, it improves your health, and it improves your whole thing.  It goes into your subconscious.  My mother, she always said I’m young, healthy and happy.  And she always tried to keep that in mind.  I’m young, healthy and happy.  Even when she got, she lived to be ninety, well, she was almost ninety-four I think, yeah.  And I think she finally kind of give up there you know.  I don’t know.  But she always said, “I’m young, healthy and happy.”  Well, I didn’t think too much about it, but she always said, in other words, faith healing.  She claimed it was faith healing.  I’m young, healthy and happy.  And she held that in her mind so she was never sick.  She never was very sick except for the small pox.

EM:  Do you have that same attitude; I’m young, healthy and happy?  Do you have that too?

PM:  I try to now, since I understood, but at that time I didn’t because I never believed too much in religion and I thought it was religion see?  And it was religion with her and she didn’t know anything about the subconscious and so forth.  Since I got that book, I think it was by David, did you ever hear of a fellow by the name of David Dietz?

EM:  Would it be D-I-E-T-Z?  Or D-E-E?

PM:  D-I-E-T-Z I believe, or something like that; David Dietz.  He was the one that wrote this book that I had on physiology and I got a lot out of that.  In the book it said, I don’t think that come from that book, it come from some place else.  I don’t know where that come from.  But, any way, he said that, mentioned about the subconscious and about your conscious mind.  Well, to that book, I take your conscious mind, or to that article, your subconscious is the part of your brain that controls your heart and liver and your muscles and everything, and your healing especially.  You get a cut on your hand, in other words, and it heals.  And so that comes from your subconscious.  If your subconscious didn't work, didn’t say that that ought to be healed, it wouldn’t heal.  And that’s a part of your brain that does that and you have no control over that except that your intellect, if you believe something, if you think something and you believe it with your intellect, and you keep believing it, like mother believed, “I’m young, healthy and happy,” she believed it.  It was religion with her.  But it don’t make any difference if it’s religion or what it is, it’ll work if you do it, see?  If you control your subconscious.  That’s the challenge.  So if a person is, when, in other words, if the doctor says I have a, like poor old Sheldon Westover when he had, when he come down with cancer here, I read an article in the paper here about cancer, or about faith healing, and it said that faith healing didn’t work and this was a religious article.  But it said it didn’t work, because they claimed it would even work on cancer and all kinds of stuff.  The faith healers claim it works on all cancer and all kinds of stuff.  In other words, that’s poppycock.  I won’t work.  And the idea of faith healing that he spoke about there, that they said that I am, let’s see, I, well I forgot, I can’t think of what it was right now.  But anyway, it’s an affirmation of something that supposed to, in other words, denial of something that’s supposed to be wrong with you, you know.  And he says in the article there, I think you’ve probably got it in one of those papers, he said in the article if you, we know darn well that it won’t work, you know.  It’s not going to heal cancer.  Well, according to David Dietz’s book, you have to do your part.  You can’t just say, “Well, I am healed of cancer.  I’m healed.”  If you can get a doctor to cut it out or something, you know, and help you do your part, then you work on it, see, on you subconscious and get your subconscious to try to heal it, you know.  In other words, to try to make yourself believe it’s healed.  And according to this article here, and that’s on page, it must be, well I don’t know, but I marked it here some place.  Oh, “It’s not done in a moment.  But little by little, man is built from within to without.  A new creature in consciousness, mind and body.  It is only that your,” well, I don’t know.  I marked it here some place.  Well, anyway, you, I’m, at my age, why if I do have, if they do come up with cancer causing my trouble, they spoke that maybe it could be cancer, or maybe it could be diabetes or it could be anything.  If they come up with cancer, why should I let them cut me all up, you know.  At my age!  I’m going to die anyway.  So why not just forget about it and claim that, you know, and try to make myself believe that I’m okay.  It’s going to be healed.

EM:  I can only hope that you don’t have any serious problems.

PM:  I do, too, you know.  That’s probably the worst thing.  Dennis says that a lot of times, I put myself down, see?  And he said, “Quit putting yourself down.”  Possibly I do. 

EM:  I’m glad to hear that you spoke with Dave over the holidays.  Did you speak with Dennis also?

PM:  Yeah!  I spoke with Dennis also. 

EM:  Good.

PM:  And I spoke with Shelley, my granddaughter in California.  Let’s see, that’s Shelley there.  That’s Dave’s oldest daughter.  And that’s Dave’s youngest daughter.  And this is her, Shelley’s daughter.

EM:  Where in California does she live?

PM:  In, well, it’s in the Los Angeles area.

EM:  Uh-huh.

PM:  Let’s see.  Well anyway, it’s in the Los Angeles area.  But Colleen, Dennis’s youngest daughter, Colleen, is in Brewer, Maine.  I didn’t speak with her, but I did about a month ago.  She called me.  And Erin is in Seattle, Maplewood Avenue, Bellingham, Washington.  So Shelley’s in California.  Oh, here we are.  She at Tujunga Boulevard, Tujunga, California.  You know where Tujunga is?  I don’t either.

EM:  I don’t.  Well, Paul, I’ve got to get going here.  I’d like to come back in a couple weeks, if that’s okay.

PM:  That’s fine.

EM:  I appreciate you hospitality once again.  Next time, I won’t ask you about predictions.  We’ll go back into the past and talk about some of these other issues.  Okay?

PM:  Okay.

EM:  I appreciate your willingness to talk about these things today.

PM:  Okay.  This here, you copied.

EM:  That’s correct.  This and this, there’s some articles here, well, I added this here, believes this or that of brainwashing, and so forth.  This is, we believe this and that and this is something that we should never teach our kids.

EM:  A theologian, I believe his name is Mark Buber, B-U-B-E-R, I can’t confess to having read much, talk about I and thou, and I and we.  It seems to me that whenever you see the word “we,” instead of “I,” “we” causes you problems because it suggests conformity.  It suggests blind obedience, whereas the concept of I is one that you embrace as individual and, anyway, it’s just a thought that comes to my mind today.

PM:  Yeah, I think that is just right.  We, yes, we are supposed to do this and that according to religion.  The scientists don’t do that.  The scientist, he goes out to try to learn.  And so that speaks about the search for truth in there and it speaks about the holy spirit as the holy spirit as the god, in other words, is your mind.  And your mind of perfection, god in heaven is your perfect mind.  But you’re not perfect, see?  But that’s the perfect part of your mind.  That’s the way I get it on that.  And so you listen to that and you learn from that and you try to become it.  And that’s the search for truth.  You try to become a follower of that.  And that’s the search for truth.  And the holy spirit would be the would try to connect you with your mind, you know, try to connect your action with your mind.  That’s kind of the way I get it but you may get that a little different than I do.

EM:  Well, I will plan to make two copies of this and bring it back in a couple of weeks, if that’s okay.

PM:  Yeah, that’d be fine.

EM:  All right.  I’m going to end it there.  Thank you.